Fact Check Me: The Best Pundit Isn’t on the Panel
If anyone should be trying to make it as a columnist or a football pundit, it’s my wife.
And I don’t mean in a cute, supportive-husband way.
I mean objectively.
She’s actually smart.
She understands details.
She remembers everything.
She’ll tear your argument apart calmly, politely, and with receipts — and then she’ll sit there and take whatever comes back at her without flinching.
But she never forgets.
That’s why, if my wife ever decided to write about football, most of the industry would be finished overnight.
It wouldn’t be a panel anymore.
It would be my wife, Michael Owen, Jamie Carragher, and a long stretch of silence while everyone else recalibrates what they thought expertise looked like.
Because they talk from experience.
She talks from understanding.
She doesn’t just know the game — she reads it.
The player.
The coach.
The ref.
The politics.
The personality clashes.
The fear behind a bad decision.
The ego behind a reckless one.
The invisible stuff happening between every kick of the ball.
She loves football the way it’s supposed to be loved — not as content, not as nostalgia, not as brand management.
She loves it as a system.
A family.
A place where underdogs survive long enough to be seen.
She loves the kids’ stories.
The quiet ones.
The late bloomers.
The ones who climbed from nothing — like the refugee she is.
Those are her people.
She sees them early.
Before the world decides what they’re worth.
She gives them a boost when she can — not to claim them, not to own them, just enough to help them believe they belong near greatness.
She doesn’t need to be the greatness.
She just deserves to be near it — so it rubs off on the right people.
And coaches?
If they were smart, they’d pick her brain constantly.
Not just about tactics — about truth.
Who’s rattled.
Who’s hiding.
Who’s lying confidently.
Who’s one bad touch away from disappearing.
Who’s ready to grow if someone just stops yelling at them.
She takes names.
She calls it exactly how she sees it.
And somehow — this is the rare part — she’s fair even when she’s biased.
Even when she hates that guy.
Right now, instead of sitting in a studio or writing a column, she’s folding laundry.
She’s supporting my loud, public, ridiculous pursuit of whatever this thing is I’m building.
She’s got Emily in Paris on in the background, like this is all perfectly normal.
Don’t feel bad for her.
That’s not sacrifice.
That’s choice.
The world is full of people desperate to be important.
It’s much rarer to find someone important enough to step out of the spotlight and still shape everything around them.
And if she ever decides she’s done folding laundry and wants to talk football publicly?
Some very comfortable men are going to learn — all at once —
that loving the game loudly is not the same thing as understanding it deeply.
Fact check me if you want.
But the best pundit in the room usually isn’t the one talking.
I loved this.
I can see you have a deep appreciation for your wife.